Today the Doodlebugs took a look at a fun video on the life of the Monarch Butterfly and then of course we had a little chit chat about symmetry and what that means! We really looked closely at the gorgeous orange and black of the Monarch Butterfly and it's patterns and then they got down to creating this wondrous creature using our nifty printing technique.

No drawing here! My little friends held their big brushes and made big sweeping movements to create wings and printed them on the other side and the looks on their faces throughout the process! I got a good many of them with the old 'tongue sticking out the mouth concentration' look lol!

They also got to practice some more colour mixing as I made them layer yellow and red and then of course they got our gorgeous orange monarch colour! Colour mixing this way is a lot less messy... hmmm

Today the Doodlebugs were in outer space! We talked about symmetry and what it means and then we used our craft supplies to create alien space creatures that were the exact same on both sides... I'm sure you can imagine the chaos and the fun... lol!

Oh and of course we had to paint a background complete with a spaceship for our little girl aliens... yes these aliens are all girls. Naturally.

Today the Doodlebugs painted a butterfly... but this is Arty Pants Studio, where smarty pants thrive and flourish. So to foster the inquisitive nature of our little ones I showed them this video on how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. All my Doodlebugs may not be able to remember the term exoskeleton at the end of this, but I think there's value in exposing them to the proper names for things and making them aware of processes so when they encounter them again and again, they will say... oh yeah, that sounds familiar until one day they just know :)

We talked about the parts of the butterfly and I had some pictures of butterflies printed out for inspiration.

And of course, any time you have a group of eager 5 and 6 year olds waiting for paint some strategy is required... so we played a little game I call The Smartest Artist.

Smartest Artist Questions for the day...

1) How many stages does it take for a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly? 2) What do butterflies eat? 3) How do butterflies taste food?

We also talked about symmetry, I SUGGESTED that the wings be the same on both sides, but who can blame a 5 year old for thinking this is just too boring and restrictive?

So they drew their butterflies, drew in patterns and painted them in using tiny brushes to help them stay in the lines.

Symmetry is all around us... but one of the most beautiful examples of symmetry that occurs naturally in nature is you guessed it... the BUTTERFLY!

But it's not enough to give my kiddies this one example... in true Arty Pants (Art + Smarty Pants) style we took a look at the educational video below that quickly gives the basics of symmetry and puts our art class for the day into perspective!

To emphasize the symmetry in this beautiful creature we folded our pages in half, opened them again and drew half a butterfly in black oil pastel. I told them to press really hard cause we were going to need it to print on the other side of the page!

So the next step of course was to fold the paper back in half and rub so the image was pressed onto the opposite side of the page. Then they traced the print over to complete the picture and then painted them using pan watercolours. For the final flourish we painted the background in liquid watercolours and sprinkled some salt while it was still wet to get a mottled effect. (A bit of science in art... the salt sucks up the water in the watercolour leaving it looking speckled!)